The Challenge of Change

Change is hard. It doesn’t matter who you are, it’s hard. That doesn’t mean that it’s not often the right thing, but it can still be hard. Tough. Difficult. Stressful. Different. Uncertain. Unknown.

Leaving university? Hard. And yet, I don’t have to write essays anymore. I live in a flat where appliances aren’t falling apart and I don’t find vodka bottles from many tenants ago. And I’m making money! But it’s hard.

Leaving your friends? Hard. I’m no longer no further than three streets away from my friends, always available for last minute pub plans, procrastination walks or within reach of a freshly poured gin and tonic. Birthday celebrations? All of us were there. Christmas celebrations? We were all there. End of exams? New puppy? Last minute gossip? New boy? New drama? There. Not at the end of a phone. Not on facetime. There. Physically with you. Able to hug you. To see you. To see when you’re upset, to see when you’re happy, to celebrate with you, to cry with you, to walk with you, to sit with you, to talk to you. But now I can see them achieving so much! I get to watch them move to the cities of their dreams. Make new friends. Have new experiences. And I get to hear about them! And me, I get to do the same. To make new friends and ring up new people for drinks. To celebrate new events. Meet new puppies. And then call old friends to tell them about the new.

Moving to a new city? Hard. Moving to a brand-new city that you’ve never been to before and in which you know no one? Really hard. I don’t know my neighbours, don’t know my local pub, my local coffee shop, or my local Tesco. I don’t bump into friends on my way to the library, get a discount at my favourite restaurant, know who does the best ice cream or the fastest route to get to the gym. I don’t have a favourite walk, a favourite run or even a favourite sitting place. But I get to find different ones. People are just as friendly in a city as in a small town, there’s just more of them. Dogs are just as energetic in parks as on a beach, runs are just as difficult through a dene as along a cliff, pubs are just as lively, Tesco still does the Clubcard discount, cafes still make coffee, water still runs, bins still get emptied, neighbours still blast music, the rain still pours and the north of England is just as cold as the east coast of Scotland. It’s just unknown. And I get to start again and get to know it from the beginning.

Starting a new job? Hard. Starting a new job having just left university, left my friends and moved to a new city? Really hard. Starting a new job having just left university, left my friends and moved to a new city in a global pandemic where you start off fully remote and you’re not really sure what’s going to happen in the future? Really, bloody hard. I no longer write essays, I analyse excel reports. I don’t discuss post-colonial novels, I sit in strategy meetings. I don’t have seminars and lectures, I have global calls and presentations. If I mess up, it’s not a grade that gets affected, it’s a person. Multiple people. These last six months have been a mad rush to swallow so much information, to develop so many skills, to meet people and work with people and present my best self. All while sitting in my bedroom, trying to blur my camera so you can’t see Tigger in the background on my bed, afraid of reaching out on Teams because I just for the life of me cannot get the VLOOKUP function right. Or, while finally making it to the office! Struggling to gauge people’s reactions to your ideas behind a mask, sitting socially-distanced on the lunch table or wondering where the other 70% of the office is. And whether in the office or in my bedroom or my kitchen table or someone else’s living room, always wondering ‘am I good enough?’ ‘Should I be here?’ ‘When will they figure out I don’t know what I’m doing?’

So, change is hard. But the more changes you encounter, the more you know how to deal with them. How to find outdoor gym classes where you giggle with a stranger about how muddy you all are in the rain. How to find any mutual friend, even if it’s your boyfriend’s friend’s sister’s old uni flatmate, and then organise cocktails and laugh about early morning ocean dips. How to find out that a uni friend is moving to the city too, and you can move in together and explore new pubs and meet their course friends and host a party and watch football and the Undateables and eat Colin the Caterpillar and laugh about what happened the night before. How to find a new running route that ends in a doughnut shop, a new café two metres from your front door that does the best flat whites, to find a new national park where you can walk along crags and see nothing for miles and yet be only 40 minutes away from home. And that’s the main thing, the important thing, you can find a new home. Home is mobile, it isn’t permanent. Home is in the lazy evenings, the late-night beers, the early morning strolls, the windy runs, the smell of curry from the kitchen, the constant cups of tea and coffee that come with an endless supply of biscuits, the birthday cards on the mantelpiece, the pictures on your wall. And home isn’t just one place. I’m learning that. Slowly. But I’m learning. While a piece of me calls home in a small Scottish town, it also calls home in a city in the desert, in a small flat in Edinburgh, a country house in Sussex and finally, a small, two-bedroomed, slightly misshapen, constantly-warm, constantly singing flat in Newcastle.